We’ve all been there, eh? One minute you’re imagining violent and fitting deaths for all the people who demean and annoy you on a daily basis, and the next those very same people are dying in front of you while you’re powerless to help. What? You’ve…not been there? Oh.
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Back in 2020 I read and largely enjoyed Jamie Probin’s novel The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) and the short story ‘The Episode of the Nine Monets’ (2020). The first was admittedly rather prolix, but it showed great promise and I’ve kept an eye out for his work ever since.
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After five novels of seemingly impossible crimes explained away with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, James Scott Byrnside tackles the far harder shorter form in his latest book, It’s About Impossible Crime (2025), which gives us five stories featuring his most frequent protagonists, Chicago P.I.s Rowan Manory and Walter Williams.
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A nice bit of crossover here, with a juvenile mystery that’s also a self-published impossible crime novel easing the transition from Minor Felonies this month to another batch of Adventures in Self-Publishing in November.
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While it’s only the second book I’ve read in the Screech Owl series, Death Down Under (2001) by Roy MacGregor is in fact the fifteenth entry, and continues the tonal dissonance from my first encounter.
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For the restraint alone in not calling this dog-as-detective story an ‘im-paw-sible crime’, this 14th entry in the Sebastian (Super Sleuth) series by Mary Blount Christian deserves checking out.
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Having fared wonderfully with Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers (and Dog), and faring as I am less well with the first three so-called ‘R’ Mysteries I’ve read so far, I was intrigued to see mentioned online that one of the Secret Seven novels was more of a clue-based mystery than its brethren…and so to the appropriately(?)-named Secret Seven Mystery (1957) does my attention turn.
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Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, where murder and magic mingle in an alternate-history Europe, being a closed set, I had never really thought to consider the gaps between them before now.
Continue readingA gap of six years followed Randall Garrett’s sole Lord Darcy novel Too Many Magicians (1967) before he returned to the universe. Was that time well-spent in creating another strong fusion of mystery, magic, and murder?
Continue readingMore magic, mummery, and misdirection from Randall Garrett’s alternate history Europe, and this time a bit of an impossible crime thrown in to boot. Not that he makes much of that element.
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The Invisible Event 